Every year amongst the haunted house retreads and cyclical sequels, the horror genre runs its bony fingers down the blackboard, walks over your grave, and manages to imprint indelible images and fear into your waking life. Last year it was “It Follows”, and now it’s the turn of Robert Eggers’ insidious chiller to put an uncomfortable spell on you with its tale of New England paganism, screaming banshees, and possession.
When a family of English Puritans are cast asunder from their plantation for an unspeakable and unspecified reason, they settle in a field within close proximity to the woodland. The patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) vows to “conquer this wilderness”, and grows crops with which to feed his family; wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) and her newborn Samuel, eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), her brother Caleb, and the twins.
They are a God-fearing family, and for all intents and purposes, a normal one, until Thomasin’s game of peek-a-boo with her baby brother ends with him vanishing, with only the rustle of the bushes giving any clue to his fate. Distraught by his abduction, the family begin to emotionally crumble, with fingers pointed and blame assigned, and the growing feeling that with their corn plagued, they might all be cursed by a pointy nosed wiccan.
